Become a Legitimate Emailer

As mentioned previously, email marketing is black and white, you either do it correctly, or you don't. There are seven things you must do to set your self apart from the email marketing wannabes.

Grow your list naturally
Sure, this is hard to do, but it will pay big dividends with establishing and maintaining your email reputation. A purchased list may have a collection of email addresses interested in what you have to offer. It may contain people who opted to receive information on whatever it is you are trying to sell. But, if they did not agree on a sign up form on your website, chances are, once you send them an email, they will not care about all that and will instintively reach for their report as spam button.

According to Direct Magazine "the Inbox providers, such as Yahoo, AOL and Gmail, all use the percentage of people who hit the "report spam" button for a particular sender as the No. 1 gage in considering whether to deliver incoming email to users' inboxes or not." If you send to a list with a high percentage of purchased emails, your spam rating is going to be higher. If you feel you must supplement your list with some purchased email addresses, consider easing them into your production list and defintately consider inviting them to opt-in before you send your first real email message.

Honor opt-outs immediately
The CAN-SPAM law gives you ten days to honor unsubscribe requests, but you want to do it immediately. Most of the people who unsubscribe or opt-out of your email message would be disappointed if they continued to receive ten more messages after they opted-out. The way the register their disappointment is by reaching for the mark as spam button, which will negatively affect your email reputation.

De-spam your message
Test all email messages before they go out, against a spam checker. Spam assasin and others offer tools that can grade the message to ensure it is not too spammy. The danger is that your message will be delivered to the junk mail box and be marked as spam in bulk. Most email clients have an option to mark all the messages in the junk folder and report them all as spam. The recipient never even sees the message, but your reputation suffers.

Personalize your message
Most bulk email marketing programs allow you to personalize your message. People like seeing email messages that are addressed to them specifically. The more you make your email message a correspondence, the more responsive they are to what you are offering. Personalizing also ensures that the content is something that interests or pertains to the recipient.

Segment your list
Tracking recipient behaviour can help you segment your list by whatever criteria you happen to collect. Segmenting allows you to send your messages in smaller chucks, making recipient ISPs happier and less likely to get on your case. Jeanne Jennings at ClickZ has an excellent series about list segmentation and all the things you can do with the information you gather.

Monitor delivery
Knowing what is going on with your messages can help you strategize your overal marketing goals. You used to never know if your email reached its destination unless you are tracking opens and click throughs, metrics which are better at showing you trends rather than actually providing you solid data on deliverability. Sign up with Delivery Monitor and find out exactly what is going on with your bulk email campaigns.

Get accredited
Finally, you should accredit your email to help the recipient know that the email you send is from a trustworthy, legtitimate email marketer. SuretyMail works directly with all the top ISPs which account for the vast majority of delivery issues. When you send accredited email, ISPs and spam blockers know that your email is legitimate. Of course you have to do all the other things we mentioned and more in order to get accredited, but you with SuretyMail you have extra assurance that your email messages are reaching the inbox.

Copyright 2008, Pathfinder Email Consulting